THE NOMINEE RETURNS – U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy greets well-wishers at Barnstable Municipal Airport in June 1960, fresh from his victory at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

A new documentary film sponsored by the JFK Hyannis Museum Foundation showing President John F. Kennedy’s close connection to Hyannisport is scheduled to premiere on Oct. 3 at the Hyannisport Club. The one-hour film, titled At the Center of the World – Hyannisport and the Presidency of John F. Kennedy, produced by Andrew Fone, is a congenial look at the 35th president of the United States featuring interviews with people who knew the president during those days of Camelot when the summer White House was in our backyard,

While the film does chronicle the major events in Kennedy’s life both prior to and during his brief presidency, it is the recollections of local residents as they talk about their neighbor and friend – a man living up the street and who just happened to occupy the most important office in the country – that makes it special.

Everyone living on the Cape in the early 1960s remembers the young and vigorous man who captivated the American public as president. Handsome and self-assured, John Kennedy was at ease with foreign heads of state and equally comfortable with ordinary people. As his brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, recalls, “He was a charmer and loved to mingle with people at all levels. He was agreeable, affable, warm and welcoming.”

Veteran journalist Ed Semprini tells a story of how the president played through Semprini’s foursome at the Hyannisport Golf Club one summer day: “He was very courteous and asked if we would join him on the next hole. We told him it would be a great honor. There were a lot of people watching and I stood on that tee and said to myself, I don’t care where you hit the ball, for goodness sake, just hit it. And I did, sending it just short of the green. We let the president putt out and go ahead of us. It was a wonderful memory.”

After Kennedy’s election, Hyannisport moved front and center on the world stage. It was not uncommon to see world leaders landing at Barnstable Municipal Airport or Otis Air Base and then being airlifted by helicopter to the front lawn of the Kennedy compound. David Crawford, who helped provide security at the waterfront, remembers that he always knew where to station himself on Fridays to get a good look at the president as he exited the helicopter: “Lots of people – even some Republicans – were up in their bedrooms looking out the window when the president arrived.”

Most Cape Codders seemed to take the presence of the president almost for granted and despite the inconveniences of increased traffic they were, as Ted Kennedy put it, “resilient, courteous, and kind”

“The president was a hometown boy, so to speak, and they just let him be,” said former Cape Cod Standard Times reporter Gordon Caldwell. It seemed normal to see the family sailing off Hyannisport, downtown shopping, or attending Sunday Mass at St. Francis Xavier.

Newsreel film, much of it not seen before, sets the documentary clearly in another time. Viewers – especially if they are not Boomers – will wonder at how primitive and low key election coverage was a half-century ago. We see an election reporter sticking magnetic cutouts of states on a map of the country as the vote count shifted between the Democrats and Republicans. The black and white monitors flicker. Women, if they are present at all, seem more ornamental than of any substance.

The scenes at the Hyannis Armory on the day following the election show hundreds, not thousands, of curious onlookers – mostly locals, who ambled over from Main Street to see the president-elect arrive to make his victory speech. My mother and her co-workers left their office next to Liggett’s Drug Store to head down to South Street to see history being made. She told her startled boss – a Republican – that he could fire them all but she wasn’t going to miss Kennedy’s speech. The night before, she had grounded me for coming in after midnight after being at the armory, even though I had given her the exact same excuse.

As with every narrative about John Kennedy, the film works its way inexorably toward Nov. 22, 1963 and the events in Dallas that are seared into the minds of all who were living on that day. Again, the voice of a local person, radio personality Dan Serpico, sums up so much of what we felt on that day: “When I heard about it, I didn’t know where we were headed. It was a tragedy. There was a great deal of sadness.”

President Kennedy was always invigorated by his visits to Hyannisport. And the documentary makes that clear by showing the warm connection between the man and the place he most enjoyed being.

“The president loved it here and he loved spending time here with family,” said Sen. Kennedy. “He’d just relax, walking on the beach and skipping stones on the water. It was indeed the place he called home.”

Tickets for the world premiere party and screening are $125, including cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. RSVP at
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or call 508-790-3077, ext. 22.